Today – December 28, 2019 – is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, when we remember Herod’s order to slaughter all Bethlehem’s males aged two and under. His aim was to kill a potential rival — the Messiah — but Mary, Joseph, and Jesus were already fleeing to Egypt.

I think of Herod. His life testified to power’s dehumanization. He knew he was unpopular because he was the Roman Empire’s favored buck, a half-Jew, and indifferent to religion. So he bought into the leadership theory of Ivan The Terrible, Joseph Stalin, and Idi Amin and headed off suspected plots via strategic murder. He killed his wife, his brother, and his sister’s two husbands. Slaughter was policy. Butchery was a management technique. Carnage was protocol.

My guess: Herod stared with a vacant gaze. He knew nothing of friendship; all relationships were transactional; a given man or woman or child was as valuable as a potted plant. Today’s pal might be tomorrow’s enemy, so smile with a sharpened sword.

The world is filled with lesser Herods. Some billionaires link up with their latest trophy wives and beam with pride over their quashed competitors. Tyrannical bosses think nothing of ruining careers and families. They smile with their lips but not with their eyes. Perhaps they know momentary happiness, but their humanity shriveled while their wealth mounted and they cannot experience genuine joy. They may even view it as a weakness.

Our dark side secretly envies such people – if, for no other reason, than they get away with it – but watch their eyes next time. You’ll see their empty smiles and the predator’s gaze.

That’s the terrible price of toxic power. Even children threaten as potential enemies.

First, he offered two excuses for a crass tweet unbecoming of any spiritual leader (he said David Platt, a Virginia pastor, should “grow a pair”). Excuse One: He’s never been a minister. He’s merely a lawyer, a real estate developer, and a university president. Excuse Two: Christian maturity at Liberty University isn’t his department. Go to the faculty, students, and campus pastor for spirituality; he’s just there to keep the place humming.

Then there’s his response to Russell Moore, the president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, who expressed moral outrage over reported ill-treatment of migrant children at a Texas border facility. Moore’s heartfelt objections are standard fare among Christian thinkers: “Those created in the image of God should be treated with dignity and compassion, especially those seeking refuge from violence back home. We can do better than this.”

Falwell tweeted a reply too tempting for recovering sarcasm addicts. They’d toss their sobriety pins and reel in an acerbic spree. He said this: “Who are you, @drmoore? Have you ever met a payroll? Have you ever built an organization of any type from scratch? What gives you authority to speak on any issue? I’m being serious. You’re nothing but an employee — a bureaucrat.”

Never mind Moore’s ordination, academic degrees, and appointment to an office designated to render opinions on social and personal ethics. Moore isn’t a business entrepreneur and hasn’t met a payroll, so nix his opinions on social morality and humane treatment. He’s as unqualified as Augustine, John of Damascus, Thomas Aquinas, Clare of Assisi, Bonaventure, Teresa of Avila, Jonathan Edwards, and 20th-century Christian thinkers like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth, Edward J. Carnell, and Thomas Oden. And please ignore Karen Swallow Prior, a mere employee on Liberty University’s faculty.

Falwell’s logical inconsistencies and fallacies gleam like a saloon’s neon sign. Perhaps Amy Sullivan tweeted the best reply after she tossed her sarcasm sobriety pin: “Thoughts and prayers for Jerry Falwell Jr during what is clearly a stressful time for him.”

I long to board a plane, land in New Zealand, and weep with those who are weeping. Forty-nine were killed at two mosques in Christchurch, with an alleged Australian gunman streaming the rampage on Facebook and leaving us an on-line manifesto. Four have been detained.

Needless to say, the assailant(s?) were “extremist.” Authorities are right in describing this as “an act of terror.” Many, like me, are searching for words.

Mine came from a reading from today’s Liturgy of the Hours. Saint Aelred of Rievaulx offers us a alternative extreme (no moderation here). The 12th-century Scottish saint extols Christ’s love for enemies. Aelrod knew whereof he spoke: He was widely known for his energy and gentleness. Dom Henry Wansbrough describes him: “Aelred was a singularly attractive figure, a man of great spiritual power but also of warm friendliness and humanity.”

Consider Aelrod’s homily my reply to the terrorists:

The perfection of brotherly love lies in the love of one’s enemies. We can find no greater inspiration for this than grateful remembrance of the wonderful patience of Christ. He who is more fair than all the sons of men offered his fair face to be spat upon by sinful men; he allowed those eyes that rule the universe to be blindfolded by wicked men; he bared his back to the scourges; he submitted that head which strikes terror in principalities and powers to the sharpness of the thorns; he gave himself up to be mocked and reviled, and at the end endured the cross, the nails, the lance, the gall, the vinegar, remaining always gentle, meek and full of peace.

In short, he was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and like a lamb before the shearers he kept silent, and did not open his mouth.

Who could listen to that wonderful prayer, so full of warmth, of love, of unshakable serenity – Father, forgive them – and hesitate to embrace his enemies with overflowing love? Father, he says, forgive them. Is any gentleness, any love, lacking in this prayer?

Yet he put into it something more. It was not enough to pray for them: he wanted also to make excuses for them. Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing. They are great sinners, yes, but they have little judgement; therefore, Father, forgive them. They are nailing me to the cross, but they do not know who it is that they are nailing to the cross: if they had known, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory; therefore, Father, forgive them. They think it is a lawbreaker, an impostor claiming to be God, a seducer of the people. I have hidden my face from them, and they do not recognize my glory; therefore, Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.

If someone wishes to love himself he must not allow himself to be corrupted by indulging his sinful nature. If he wishes to resist the promptings of his sinful nature he must enlarge the whole horizon of his love to contemplate the loving gentleness of the humanity of the Lord. Further, if he wishes to savior the joy of brotherly love with greater perfection and delight, he must extend even to his enemies the embrace of true love.

But if he wishes to prevent this fire of divine love from growing cold because of injuries received, let him keep the eyes of his soul always fixed on the serene patience of his beloved Lord and Savior.

]]>https://charlesredfern.com/2019/03/15/a-reply-to-terror/feed/0chuckredfernlove is the only thing that can turn an enemy into a friendForgiving & A Beach’s Sandhttps://charlesredfern.com/2019/01/11/forgiving-a-beachs-sand/
https://charlesredfern.com/2019/01/11/forgiving-a-beachs-sand/#respondFri, 11 Jan 2019 15:26:10 +0000http://charlesredfern.com/?p=6457My friend, Eden Vigil Director Lowell Bliss, plied his Facebook eloquence again and posted this meditation on forgiveness. I publish it here with his permission.

Lowell Bliss

I was walking with the dog on Nickel Beach this morning and praying about a yearlong project that I feel called to as a spiritual athlete, namely not to enter the 2020 election/prophetic cycle without being as “fully forgiven up” as possible, by which I mean Ronald Rolheiser’s aspiration: “I forgive others for hurting me, I forgive myself for sinning, I forgive life for not being fair, and I forgive God for not rescuing me.”

At one point on my walk, I felt I was being given an image in the surf at my feet. We have no control over the waves that wash up on us and over us. Today the air was cold and the wind from the south was kicked up and Lake Erie was crashing higher than normal on southern Ontario. My late mom was famous for her platitudes and here is one of them: “All the water in all the oceans can’t sink a ship unless it gets inside.” I think that applies to boats, but I don’t think it applies to human beings. We are created to be permeable. We aren’t like rock cliffs on the coast; we are like sand on the beach. If we are not permeable to hatred, fear, and hurt, neither would we be permeable to love and kindness. So I don’t think we have as much control over what gets inside us at any given moment. Neither, in truth, do we have as much control over forgiving others as we may think. We of course have some, perhaps even much. Forgiveness engages our wills, and can even begin there if all else fails. “I forgive; help my unforgiveness” seems like an appropriate prayer, but my point is that if forgiving others was totally under my control, then I wouldn’t have to pray that prayer repeatedly over the span of weeks and months or the entirety of 2019.

If we are permeable on the way in, then we are also permeable on the way out. This was the image of the surf on the sand on the beach. Each wave came in and inundated the sand, turned that patch of beach a slightly darker color. When the wave receded again–as they always do, just as the Great Lakes return to a regular calm in anticipation of their final and eternal placidity–you could watch the water seep out of the sand as well. Soon no movement at all was perceptible, but the color of the sand was turning a lighter shade. I accepted it as evidence, easily deducible, that water was seeping out.

Our lives in Christ Jesus, like all beaches, are built on a slant. We are not built high enough above the shore to prevent the waves reaching us, but we are built with enough slope that the water will eventually seep downhill again and out to sea. We can trust this. We can give it time. The one thing however we do have control over, it seems to me, is whether we build any sandcastle fortress at the edge of the water, useless for keeping new waves at bay, but tragically effective at trapping water behind it.

Today — October 4th, 2018 — is the feast day of Saint Francis, the thirteenth-century Assisi native who gave up his inheritance rights as he fell in love with God. His fame radiates so far and wide that we needn’t say much more. It’s best just to listen. Here’s something he wrote, lifted from today’s readings in the Liturgy of the Hours:

It was through his archangel, Saint Gabriel, that the Father above made known to the holy and glorious Virgin Mary that the worthy, holy and glorious Word of the Father would come from heaven and take from her womb the real flesh of our human frailty. Though he was wealthy beyond reckoning, he still willingly chose to be poor with his blessed mother. And shortly before his passion he celebrated the Passover with his disciples. Then he prayed to his Father saying: Father, if it be possible, let this cup be taken from me.

Nevertheless, he reposed his will in the will of his Father. The Father willed that his blessed and glorious Son, whom he gave to us and who was born for us, should through his own blood offer himself as a sacrificial victim on the altar of the cross. This was to be done not for himself through whom all things were made, but for our sins. It was intended to leave us an example of how to follow in his footsteps. And he desires all of us to be saved through him, and to receive him with pure heart and chaste body.

O how happy and blessed are those who love the Lord and do as the Lord himself said in the gospel: You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and your whole soul; and your neighbor as yourself. Therefore, let us love God and adore him with pure heart and mind. This is his particular desire when he says: True worshipers adore the Father in spirit and truth. For all who adore him must do so in the spirit of truth. Let us also direct to him our praises and prayers saying: Our Father, who art in heaven, since we must always pray and never grow slack.

Furthermore, let us produce worthy fruits of penance. Let us also love our neighbors as ourselves. Let us have charity and humility. Let us give alms because these cleanse our souls from the stains of sin. Men lose all the material things they leave behind them in this world, but they carry with them the reward of their charity and the alms they give. For these they will receive from the Lord the reward and recompense they deserve. We must not be wise and prudent according to the flesh. Rather we must be simple, humble and pure. We should never desire to be over others. Instead, we ought to be servants who are submissive to every human being for God’s sake. The Spirit of the Lord will rest on all who live in this way and persevere in it to the end. He will permanently dwell in them. They will be the Father’s children who do his work. They are the spouses, brothers and mothers of our Lord Jesus Christ.

This is another sample chapter in a book I’m writing, which maps out how white American evangelical Christianity morphed from intellectual sophistication into an arena for bullies, trashing its heritage and time-honored creeds in the process. Many rightly bemoan the movement’s partisan takeover; but, as seen here, the partisanship stems from a more deeply-embedded disease.

The question of the hour: Who signed the bully permits so intimidators could grab power, canonize political opinions, and troll their opponents with unfounded accusations?

The answers, I’m sure, are complex and the stuff of sociological dissertations, but two hidden keys open the door to the obvious. First, it must be said: Mainline church leaders are not innocent. Many laid the foundation for partisan religion when they tilted toward the fist-pumping left. Their meetings are peppered with so many clichés you’d swear the Gospels were written by Gandhi, Robert F. Kennedy, Betty Friedan, and Edna St. Vincent Millay – and please rehearse all your sentences so they’re pared of political incorrectness.

Second, there were cracks in the foundation of the mid-century evangelical resurgence, when leaders such as Carl Henry, Harold Ockenga, and Billy Graham invited fundamentalists out of their cultural and intellectual cocoons. The term “evangelical” signaled sophistication, elegance, even urbanity. Evangelicals saw Broadway plays and, maybe, sipped Chablis.

But did they really free themselves of intimidating fundamentalism? I’m now not sure. In fact, I’ve grown more convinced that the seeds for “Fox Evangelicalism,”[i] as Amy Sullivan calls today’s religious concoction, were unwittingly planted at the movement’s advent. Most mid-century leaders never fully wrenched themselves from fundamentalism’s grip. They lionized the austere Old Princeton theologians of the previous century — Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, and BB Warfield — and the founders of Westminster Theological Seminary in Glenside, Pennsylvania, which pits John Calvin’s 16th-century Geneva against 17th-century Puritan England as rivals for the Heavenly Land award. The school’s influence spreads far beyond its campus. One of its founding professors, Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987), flaunted an especially ingenious brand of thick-headedness. It’s almost as if his wagging finger still lives.

Just to throw in confusion: Many Westminster teachers are thoughtful even as they pay Van Til homage. The school has played a constructive role as it infuses evangelical academia with scholarly rigor.

Calvinism’s heights …

I’ve needled Calvinism, so I’ll drop back and give it some deference.

To repeat, Calvinism deserves a hearing (see previous posts). Its thinkers legitimately trace their origins back to Augustine of Hippo (AD 353-430), arguably Western Christianity’s most influential theologian after the Apostle Paul. The Augustinian trail wends its way through Catholic Augustinian and Dominican orders and Protestantism’s two most famous fathers, Martin Luther (1483-1546) of Wittenberg, Germany, and Calvin himself (1509-1564), who gave the theology systematic shape in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, one of the Reformation’s paramount documents.

There’s more to Calvinism than its deterministic reading on predestination, much of it commendable, but discussion usually freezes on that subject.

Geneva evolved into a Protestant Mecca under Calvin and his successor, Theodore Beza (1519-1605). Some British divines exported the theology to their native land and were tagged as Puritans. The label stuck. Richard Baxter, John Owen, and Richard Sibbs were among the many English luminaries – although Baxter, along with others, followed Moses Amyrald’s subtly different teachings on election. John Knox spread the word in Scotland and the 17th-century New England settlers planted the theology in North America. Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), arguably America’s outstanding theologian and leading spokesman for a sweeping revival called the Great Awakening, was thoroughly Calvinist. He was also a Platonist and a mystic, and he saw nothing wrong with the Awakening’s strange manifestations: groaning, crying, shaking, screaming, and falling down.

Full disclosure: Although I don’t consider myself a Calvinist, I wouldn’t feel slapped if anyone called me “Reformed,” a broader theology to which Calvin is a foundational contributor.[ii] As I’ve said, I agree more with Jacob Arminius, the Latinized name of Dutch theologian Jacob Hermanzoon (1560-1609), who walked back from Calvin’s determinism and tried to restore the teaching of most early church thinkers.[iii] John Wesley, Methodism’s founder, popularized his theology in 18th-century Britain. Methodism spread like wildfire and Arminianism became America’s predominant evangelical theology in the 19th century.

But I understand Calvinism’s underpinnings, which hinge on humanity’s depravity and God’s sovereignty. The depravity comes into view with Adam and Eve’s rebellion: The prototypical human couple was made in God’s image, which meant both played the role of temple idols on the Earth and represented God in his rulership, holiness and love. They violated their essence and purpose upon their mutiny and devolved into anti-gods and anti-humans, much like my cells become anti-me when they mutate into cancer. We could even argue: The Sovereign Being who spans, rules, and sustains the universe not only has the right to kill off such a “spoiled species,” as CS Lewis calls us, he’s obligated to do so. After all, gardeners wipe out ants and aphids; I seek total annihilation of my malignant cells. Which means, say Calvinists, we can breathe a sigh of relief because, in a wild act of extravagant grace, God selected some of those demon-like beings for salvation and ultimate transformation. He even came to the Earth and died in an atonement limited to those he called. God jettisoned cold reason, which would have trashed us all, and chose the path of mercy.

Augustine, Calvin, and Luther give us keen insights: The universe’s story is God’s story, not ours. God is transcendent and rules the cosmos. He’s an absolute, sovereign King, not a constitutional monarch, and not bound to justify himself to us. They didn’t blink when they followed the Apostle Paul and saw our aberrance. We’re not now in our natural state. We’d look far more like gods and goddesses if we were. Love, joy, peace, gentleness, humility, justice, fairness, and graciousness would be reflexive; sin would possess the allure of skunk stench. Instead, holiness is the ideal, unobtainable now but for God’s grace. Our good works flow from God’s work in us, to follow Martin Luther’s thinking.

But a question yanks us out of deference: Is the Augustinian conception of predestination biblically correct? Arminians point to passages either implying or declaring human choice as well as Jesus’ death for the “whole world” (some examples: John 1:29; 1 John 2:2; 1 John 4:14). Their solution: Humans are, indeed, just as depraved as the Augustinians said, but the Almighty is even more gracious than they saw. God grants prevenient grace to everyone, giving each the ability to say yea or nay to Christ. Those who follow Him are justified by their faith if they “continue in (their) faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel” (Colossians 1:23). Passages invoking predestination usually refer to groups, not individuals.[iv]

I say all that not to convert Calvinists (that involves a much longer argument packed with proof-texts and debate over what biblical predestination actually is – and it’s usually a lost cause), but to make the all-important point: Arminians paddle with the Church as a whole, which has always retreated from determinism. In 529, conveners at the Second Council of Orange affirmed human depravity while rejecting the Augustinian outlook. Their words left little room for doubt: “We not only do not believe that any are foreordained to evil by the power of God, but even state with utter abhorrence that if there are those who want to believe so evil a thing, they are anathema.” What’s more, Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560), Luther’s collaborator and Protestantism’s first systematic theologian, guided Lutheranism away from his friend on this score. Calvinists often cite the dictums of the Synod of Dort (1618-1619), in which Dutch Reformers spurned and imprisoned Arminius’s followers, and the Puritan Westminster Confession of Faith (1646); but, again, the Church Universal has agreed to neither Dort nor Westminster. Anglicans as a whole never signed on and Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians barely involved themselves in the argument.

Perhaps anyone bucking the tide would adopt humility – especially when they spill gallons of ink proving universal human depravity, which would include themselves.

… and depths

To be sure, many Reformed thinkers are gracious. Pastor and author Tim Keller is one; Richard Mouw, president emeritus of Fuller Theological Seminary, is another – and I think of some of my favorite seminary professors. But much of staunch Calvinism snarls with a mean streak and some of its thinkers now patrol like sentries at evangelicalism’s doctrinal gates, blowing down straw men right and left. They follow the precedent laid by their forbears, who often sprayed a bewildering array of accusations at Arminians: they’re works-righteous (we supposedly earn our way to heaven), antinomian (we’re lawless), closet Catholics, Pelagians (alleged followers of Augustine’s adversary, Pelagius [cerca 360-418], who didn’t believe in Original Sin), and anti-Trinitarian. The Calvinists pick out errant pseudo-Arminians as well as America’s most famous 19th-century evangelist, the Pelagian-leaning Charles Finney, and hold them aloft as the norm. Old Princeton’s academics were especially disparaging. Arminians replied by labeling Calvinists the “frozen chosen.”[v]

Princeton Theological Seminary eventually reorganized and opened up to theological modernism, whereupon old-schoolers led by John Gresham Machen (1881-1937) bolted and established Westminster Theological Seminary in 1929. Westminster possesses Old Princeton’s strengths (academic rigor and intellectual scrupulousness) and weaknesses (a halo gleams over Calvin’s head and the Westminster Confession is God-breathed). Some of the school’s faculty, especially its founders, made a profession of attacking anything failing to measure up to their strict interpretation of Calvinism.

Enter the vitriolic Van Til. He articulated his basic assumption in an article blasting the monumental thinking of Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968): “Only Reformed theology, based upon the doctrine of a really sovereign God, creator of heaven and earth, whose decrees include ‘whatsoever comes to pass,’ can bring men to a real Entscheidung (decision). Against Barth, as against modern theology which he seeks to oppose, we must once more raise the banner of a sovereign God and of His complete revelation in Scripture.”[vi]

I long to ask: “Did you just say that?” Only Reformed theologians say a sovereign God created the universe and inspired the Scriptures? And just how does this strain of Reformed theology, which proclaims a brand of predestination never encoded in an ecumenical creed and rejected by most of the Church, compel us “to a real decision”? Everything’s foreordained. Salvific decisions are above our pay grade.

But such was Van Til’s launching pad, and all who disagreed were fair game to unfair, inaccurate, and unbridled attack.

His feud with Barth serves as a prime example. Barth guided Protestantism away from 19th-century theological Modernism, which gutted Christianity of its inspired Scriptures, the miraculous, the Trinity, Original Sin, and the resurrection. Modernists whittled Jesus into a mere exemplary human; the Bible, pared of miracles and unsavory brood-of-viper comments, contained profound teaching for generous souls craving the “fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.”[vii] We’re not bad. We just need education.

But then came World War One’s slaughter. Supposedly kind-hearted, civilized Europeans lobbed poison gas, lit flame throwers, and braved machine-gun fire over moon-scaped landscapes so they could bayonet each other in the face. Optimistic Liberalism lay on life support.

Barth pulled the plug with his commentary on the New Testament Book of Romans, the first edition of which was published in 1918. He constantly urged in later writings: “back to Luther; back to Calvin” and insisted on an orthodox view of the Trinity (he didn’t call the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit “persons” but, instead, described them as three co-existing, eternal, and self-aware “modes of being.” This was not heretical modalism, as his Church Dogmatics makes clear[viii]). Barth would eventually be lumped with theologians such as Emil Brunner, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and others and tagged “Neo-Orthodox,” although he didn’t like the term.

Evangelicals faced a choice: Was Barth a friend or foe? True, his view on Scripture didn’t align with theirs (he claimed the Bible “contains” God’s Word) and he was fuzzy about universalism (as was Gregory of Nyssa, a revered fourth-century church father), but surely his neo-orthodoxy steered the theological world in the right direction – and kudos for standing up to Hitler and the Nazified “German Christians” in 1934: He wrote the Barmen Declaration, which railed against nationalistic intrusion into the church, while teaching in Germany. He was exiled back to Switzerland.

Van Til would have none of it. Barth was the enemy, a veritable wolf in sheep’s clothing. He saw Barth through the prism of presuppositionalism, which says the (Reformed) Christian faith lays the only platform for rational thought. Thus, there was little room for reasoned debate with non-Reformed thinkers due to mutually exclusive assumptions. In practice, this meant Van Til wouldn’t really argue. He’d second guess his opponent’s hidden presuppositions – often unknown to the adversary himself – and attack them. He convinced himself that Barth’s theology was dangerous because it was anchored in the pivotal but enigmatic philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who seemingly viewed formal religion skeptically (interpreters debate over that); second, Barth supposedly believed that God’s activity never intersected with history, which quashed the possibility of Christ’s physical resurrection.

Van Til summed up his views in the 1946 publication of The New Modernism: An Appraisal of the Theology of Barth and Brunner. The reviews have been pouring in ever since. TF Torrance, a British Barth sympathizer, said this: “ … there is in fact no attempt made to form a fair judgment of the views which are so bitterly criticized from end to end of this volume…”[ix] One normally cool-headed internet observer characterized the book as “comically grotesque.”[x]

Yet Van Til stubbornly clung to his misreading despite all evidence, violating the fundamental rule shared by scholars and respectable journalists: Get your facts right. Lewes Smedes (1921-2002) was once a Van Til student and admirer (“I was mesmerized for one semester by the boldness of Van Til’s thinking”), but then saw his pig-headedness:

“Van Til was convinced that if anyone’s assumptions about God are wrong, she cannot be trusted even when she says that she believes the gospel truth about Jesus. He wrote a book called The New Modernism in which he contended that the star theologian of the century, Karl Barth, was a modernist because, in Van Til’s view, he denied that Jesus was God in human form and denied as well that he had risen from the dead. The hitch was that Barth had affirmed these things over and over and, in fact, was largely to be credited with bringing the gospel back into the churches of Europe. But Van Til said that even if Barth shouted from the tower of St. Peter’s that Jesus was the Son of God, he could not believe what he was saying. His philosophical presuppositions would not let him.

“Several years later, after I had finished my graduate studies in Amsterdam, I had occasion to put the question to Barth himself: ‘Sir, if you will permit me an absurd anachronism, let us suppose that a journalist carried a camera into Jesus’ tomb about eight o’clock on Easter Sunday morning and took pictures of every inch of the tomb, what would have showed up on his film?’ Barth sighed. This again? He had been asked questions like this by every skeptical evangelical who got within shouting distance of him. But he was patient: ‘He would have gotten nothing but pictures of an empty tomb. Jesus was not there. He had walked out of the tomb early that morning.’

“I told Van Til about this conversation. His answer was, for me, a final exhibition of intellectual futility. “Smedes,” he said, “you have studied philosophy, you should know that Barth cannot believe that Jesus rose from the dead.” Cannot! Not merely does not, but cannot believe what he said he believed. Conversation finished.”[xi]

Van Til’s straw-man arguments roared past intellectual honesty and swung into raw bullying. Eventually, Barth – no stranger to grouchy assertiveness himself – stopped replying to the constant bombardment from him and others, including Carl Henry. He wrote to Geoffrey Bromily: “Please excuse me and please try to understand that I cannot and will not answer the questions these people put.” He explained:

“Such a discussion would have to rest on the primary presupposition that those who ask the questions have read, learned, and pondered the many things I have already said and written about these matters. They have obviously not done this, but have ignored the many hundreds of pages in the Church Dogmatics where they might at least have found out—not necessarily under the headings of history, universalism, etc. —where I really stand and do not stand. From that point they could have gone on to pose further questions.

“I sincerely respect the seriousness with which a man like [G.C.] Berkouwer studies me and then makes his criticisms. I can then answer him in detail. But I cannot respect the questions of these people from Christianity Today, for they do not focus on the reasons for my statements but on certain foolishly drawn deductions from them. Their questions are thus superficial.

“The decisive point, however, is this. The second presupposition of a fruitful discussion between them and me would have to be that we are able to talk on a common plane. But these people have already had their so-called orthodoxy for a long time. They are closed to anything else, they will cling to it at all costs, and they can adopt toward me only the role of prosecuting attorneys, trying to establish whether what I represent agrees or disagrees with their orthodoxy, in which I for my part have no interest! None of their questions leaves me with the impression that they want to seek with me the truth that is greater than us all. They take the stance of those who happily possess it already and who hope to enhance their happiness by succeeding in proving to themselves and the world that I do not share this happiness. Indeed they have long since decided and publicly proclaimed that I am a heretic, possibly (van Til) the worst heretic of all time. So be it! But they should not expect me to take the trouble to give them the satisfaction of offering explanations which they will simply use to confirm the judgment they have already passed on me.”[xii]

Van Til’s failure to see nuance in his for-me-or-against-me world even rocked his staunchly Calvinist ghetto. He went after fellow presuppositionalist Gordon Clark (1902-1985), whom Henry hailed as “one of the profoundest evangelical Protestant philosophers of our time” and Ronald Nash praised as “one of the greatest thinkers of our century.”[xiii]

Not according to Van Til, who rallied many of his Westminster colleagues in a move to defrock Clark in 1944 after the latter was ordained in their small denomination, The Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Clark’s crime: He believed God’s knowledge and humanity’s knowledge are quantitatively but not qualitatively different. Since all truth is one truth, God’s knowledge and humanity’s knowledge coincide when each apprehends the same reality. We humans can never know anything exhaustively because we’re not omniscient, so our grasp of truth will forever remain a mole hill compared with God’s Everest – even unto eternity.

Van Til said Clark had it all wrong: There’s an insurmountable wall between God’s knowledge and our knowledge, rendering God quantitatively and qualitatively incomprehensible. We only know things as fallen creatures; God knows things as a holy creator. We can only know God via Scriptural analogy and we can never understand as God understands.[xiv]

Most believers respond, “Yawn.”

This debate is all very interesting (I guess), but hardly the stuff of heresy trials. I doubt Spanish Inquisitors would even mumble in their afternoon siestas. But Van Til and his Westminster colleagues went full-bore even after Clark’s vindication. They drummed up charges against one of his defenders, so the wearied Clark faction left the denomination.

Van Til’s Ghost

Van Til’s bullying would remain a single enclave’s historical curiosity but for one thing: Some of evangelicalism’s most influential leaders sat in his classroom. Harold Ockenga graduated from Westminster in 1930; Edward John Carnell, Fuller Theological Seminary’s second president, earned two Westminster degrees and admired Van Til; Francis Schaeffer attended Westminster before transferring to an even more conservative school and popularized Van Til’s misinterpretation of Barth.

Again, there’s the snag that stymies cartoonish caricature: Westminster’s influence is far from thoroughly evil. The gracious Harvie Conn (1933-1999) taught there. Renowned historian George Marsden is an alumnus. Timothy Keller, the former pastor of Manhattan’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church, earned his Doctor of Ministry Degree under Conn’s supervision and served on the seminary’s faculty. Meredith Klein (1922-2007) split his time between Westminster’s western campus (which eventually established its independence), Gordon-Conwell, and other seminaries and wrote orthodox yet innovative interpretations of the Genesis creation narratives. Westminster graduates often achieve Ph.D.’s and populate seminary faculties. Most, like Emeritus Gordon-Conwell Professor Richard Lovelace, follow Ockenga’s lead and embraced a more irenic Reformed theology.

So there’s a Jeckyl-and-Hyde Westminster, with the much-admired Van Til revealing Mr. Hyde.

Mr. Hyde dampens evangelical academia and impedes intellectual curiosity. An assumption – usually unspoken – hovers in the background: The Old Princetonians reign on a pedestal and keep an eye on those bratty Arminians. That’s astonishing, since the 19th-century Princetonians rarely came out to play during the century’s mammoth revivals. They remained the party’s somber wall flowers, disparaging all those emotional Wesley-followers and, later, the early 20th-century Pentecostals. Roger Olson needles them from his perch at Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary, but many academics are afraid to take them on.

More troubling is the normalization of Van Til’s ignore-the-facts belligerence among influential evangelical intellects, which eventually fomented an atmosphere of fear and fostered aggressive neo-fundamentalism. The irenicism of Ockenga, Henry, and Graham would fade into the husky cantankerousness of Harold Lindsell, another leader in the evangelical resurgence. He’d write an incendiary book in the mid-1970’s that launched a needless “battle for the Bible,” pitting evangelicals against themselves.

I’ll discuss that pivotal chapter in evangelical history in my book. Suffice it to say that The Battle For The Bible opened the cages, releasing irascible neo-fundamentalists to follow Van Til’s example and prowl for heretics, ignoring facts as they tarred the reputations of the innocent.

[vii] This phrase sums up the thinking of German theologian A. Harnack in his What Is Christianity? (English translation: London: Williams and Norgate, 1901, 1904), discussed in James D.G. Dunn, Christianity in the Making, Volume 1, (Grand Rapids, Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 38.

[viii] Barth wrote on the Trinity in his Church Dogmatics 1/1: 360 ff. It can be found in an annotated and abbreviated form in R. Michael Allen, Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics: An Introduction and Reader (New York and London: T&T Clark International, 2012), pp. 30-41.

[ix] T.F. Torrance, 1947. “Review of The New Modernism” in The Evangelical Quarterly 19, p.148, 1947.

It’s now a macabre routine: Many tweet their “thoughts and prayers” in the wake of a school shooting, this time with ten dead in Santa Fe, Texas. Others chime back: “Drop the talk of thoughts and prayers unless you’re willing to do something.”

Welcome to contemporary America, where even the language of prayer polarizes. What’s more, I now sympathize with the drop-your-prayer-talk camp even though I’m a veritable prayer warrior. I’m convinced that prayer, rightly understood, can be the agency through which God alters history.

It’s just that phrase, “thoughts and prayers” gushes with civil religion’s mawkish sentiment. It’s not accompanied with the biblical realities undergirding our communion with God: We’re God’s caretakers over the Earth (Genesis 1:26, 3;15), which means we’re his co-laborers (1 Corinthians 3:9). As Genesis famously says, we’re made in God’s “image” (Genesis 1:27), a verse over which gallons of ink has been spilled through the centuries. Much of the worthy dialogue skips past the word’s Hebrew meaning: It’s the same term translated as “idol.” An idol represented a temple’s god. Couple that with the literary structure of Genesis One, which implies that God was creating a temple when he made the Earth.

Tapping Into God

Behold our original purpose: Humanity is God’s designated temple representative. The entire world was meant to be an intersection between God’s space (Heaven) and ours. That means our very reason for being – our identity, our warp and woof – is planted in God. Prayer is the means by which we tap into the source of our existence. Rebellion against God is a revolt against our reason for being: the mirror’s image riots against the man or woman it reflects. No wonder it brings death (Genesis 2:7). Venturing into evil cancels our existence.

With that in mind, we pray for God’s kingdom to come, God’s will to be done, on Earth as it is heaven (Matthew 6:10). We’re praying that God will re-inhabit His temple and rejuvenate his image. Prayer reaches into God’s space and pulls its reality onto the Earth. Jesus is invoking eschatological terminology: He’s alluding to the eschaton, a Greek word meaning “end times.” Let the future come now and invade the present. Prayer is an eschatological act of an eschatological people: We’re pulling the cosmos of the second coming into the present. The era in which swords are beaten into plowshares (Isaiah 2:4) begins with us, here and now.

Prayer is a rebellion against Adam and Eve’s revolt. As theologian Karl Barth said, “To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.” Prayer is not a veil behind which we retreat from engagement. It brings us to our source and fuels us with the life of the Spirit. The image returns to the mirror and becomes alive again. We can now encounter evil on God’s terms and armed with God’s power.

Prayer, to put it bluntly, is an act of non-violent war. The New Testament’s authors didn’t flinch at such terminology, and the Apostle Paul delineated our weapons: truth, righteousness, the gospel of peace (better yet; well-being), faith, salvation, God’s Word, and prayer in the Spirit (see Ephesians 6:10 and following). We bear the Spirit’s fruit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control: Galatians 5:22-23) and operate in his gifts as we co-labor with God.

The Theft

But then comes the great passive-aggressive hijacking. Prayer and action are ripped apart and the language of spirituality is wielded like a paralyzing taser. I’ve seen this in churches I’ve served. Suddenly, Joe and Josephine Church-goer morph into devotional giants at the mere mention of outreach: We don’t pray enough; we need more of God’s presence; we need more intimacy with God; let’s barricade ourselves in our prayer closets and launch 24-hour prayer watches and soak in God and marinate in God and submerge ourselves in God and saturate in God. The taser is drawn faster than Clint Eastwood’s pistol at the mere whisper of evangelism. We need more intercession and still more intimacy and more soaking prayer and contemplative prayer and meditative prayer.

As a pastor, I actually grew to dread terms like “intimacy” even though I relish deep communion with God. I embrace contemplative prayer and healing prayer and intercessory prayer. But the terminology was used to slam shut the prayer closet’s door and lock us inside. I never figured out how to combat the hijacked lingo and rip the taser from the passive aggressor’s hands. I longed to cry: “Real prayer involves us in the world. It is a push forward, not a retreat backward!”

The inevitable response: “You’re not bearing the fruit of patience. Obviously, you need more prayer.”

Empty Words

The phrase, “thoughts and prayers” emerges from that passive-aggressive world, but the taser has lost its juice. My “thoughts” help no one aside from myself, and the prayer’s deity launches no kingdom invasion. There’s no confession and no “uprising” against the world’s chaos: no recognition of who God is, who we are, and our position as God’s co-laborers. The image says to the mirror: “Have a nice day,” then walks away.

“Thoughts and prayers” fails to grasp Russell Moore’s insight: “The point of the Gospel is not that we would go to heaven when we die. Instead, it is that heaven will come down, transforming and renewing the earth and the entire universe.” Genuine Christian prayer embraces James 1:22: “Do not merely listen o the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.”

No doubt some invoke this terminology and sincerely pray for God’s invasion, but I’d council caution before posting it on Twitter and Facebook. It’s been abused, and our secular friends have grown weary of religious passive aggressiveness. They may not know it, but they long for true prayer’s revolution.

We’re about to enter those climactic, universe-rattling days, otherwise known as Holy Week, which begins on Palm Sunday (tomorrow, as of this writing) and reaches its zenith in the three days of the Easter Triduum (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday). It speaks to the sadness many feel today as they remember the slaughter while they “march for life.” We can remember Jesus’s march for our lives even after we’ve exercised our civil rights.

We can remember in several ways. One is to read through the biblical passages around which this week circulates. While we must beware of wooden harmonies, this link helps. Another is to join the Church at large and recall the various events traditionally assigned to each day of the week:

Palm Sunday: Sometimes called “Passion Sunday.” Jesus arrived in Jerusalem as a king – with a twist. Riding on a beast of burden signaled that he was the Prince of Peace.

Holy Monday, Holy Tuesday, and Holy Wednesday:Jesus drove out the money-changers from the temple and cursed a barren fig tree on Monday; He taught all day on Tuesday and issued his woes upon the Pharisees; Judas betrayed him on Wednesday (a day traditionally known as “Spy Wednesday”) and Christ was anointed with oil. A careful reading of all the passages shows that Jesus and his disciples occupied the temple. The authorities would have interpreted that as a dangerous, rebellious act. Read all about it here. Suffice it to say that Jesus was not always meek and mild.

Maundy Thursday:We remember Jesus’s Last Supper with his disciples, a ceremony he commanded for succeeding generations (the meaning of “Maundy” is “command”).

Good Friday:The crucifixion. Good Friday is good because Jesus died for the sins of the world, providing salvation for those who accept it. Communion is not offered in most liturgical churches; much is draped in black (although the Catholics changed the Good Friday color to red in 1970); and there are the Stations of the Cross.

Holy Saturday: Also known as the “Great Sabbath” or “Black Saturday” or “Easter Eve.” The Bible doesn’t give us much information on the location of Christ’s spirit between his bodily death and resurrection. Traditional creeds say he “descended into Hell,” with “Hell” being a translation of Hades. Some say such a doctrine has no biblical foundation. I’m not sure. First Peter 3:18-20 is tantalizing: “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit. After being made alive, he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits — to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built.” But Peter veers off before fully explaining what he meant. The very concept of Christ entering Hell seems revolting, but that’s the point: The one person who did not deserve to suffer and die did so on our behalf. The whole thing is revolting, in a sense. See 1 Corinthians 1:23 and Galatians 5:11. The cross is a “scandal.”

Easter Sunday: Hallelujah! The Lord has risen. He has risen indeed.

A final word: Don’t worry about the minor differences among the Scriptures of Holy Week. Some seem to fret and worry and perform great feats to harmonize them. Those worries only arise when we make the same demands of the Bible as an engineer would of a bridge: everything must fit lest the bridge topple into the bay. Don’t panic. The Bible is more like a painting and God is the artist. A few odd brush strokes make it more interesting.

A friendly warning to all believers reeling in America’s Great Evangelical Hijacking, where partisan bullies bray over a microphone once yielded to genteel Billy Graham: At first, bitterness feels like a cozy sweater. But it soon itches. We scratch so hard we flare welts and our screams drive people away.

Trust me. I’ve been there. I know – and my jaw remains slackened as many in my beloved back-to-the-Bible movement sink into the Trump-fawning quicksand. Still, I must remember Michele Obama’s words: “When they go low, we go high.”

The hijacking has spawned the invasion of two closely-related exotic species: the “disaffected evangelicals” (they still hold to the theology but scold their wayward brothers and sisters in every blog post, tweet, and Facebook status) and the “disgruntled former evangelicals” (they’ve fled evangelicalism and yell at it from afar). Functionally, they’re barely distinguishable and can be clumped for discussion.

Many gather in the twitter flocks surrounding John Pavlovitz, Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, and Rachel Held Evans. Their tweets often begin with “if only evangelicals would …” and “why do evangelicals think ..?” They’re unaware of Scott McNight, Katelyn Beaty, Timothy Keller, Beth Moore, Richard Mouw, Russell Moore (no relation to Beth), the Creation Care Network, and Christians for Biblical Equality, all of whom resist the bully onslaught. They’ve forgotten that traditional evangelicalism spans a theological range from Arminiasm to Calvinism to Dispensationalism – not to mention German Pietism. Perhaps those 81-19 election-year results left them too dazed to see the facts beneath the statistics: Most of those self-identified white evangelicals rarely attend church and disagree with the tradition’s historic beliefs. They’re evangelical in name only.

I knew a few now-popular disaffected-disgruntleds before they wrote books and complained of flight delays between speaking engagements. Common threads weave through their stories: Many grew up in a hermetically sealed neo-fundamentalist subculture, feathered with its shibboleths like so many chicks in a nest. They knew nothing but their fundamentalist and neo-fundamentalist worlds until calamity unveiled the horrible truth: Evangelicals aren’t always nice and, shock of shocks, there’s a vast universe of committed Christians beyond their coalition’s pale. They discover dedicated Catholics and Eastern Orthodox believers who sincerely praise Jesus. They even unearth supposedly evil “secular humanists” who are deeply humanitarian.

They sicked-up their grim neo-fundamentalism and now heap poxes on the entire evangelical house. They fail to grasp that they lived in one of the movement’s cobwebbed closets, usually painted in strict Calvinist and Dispensationalist hues.

I remember one in seminary before he became well-known. I’ll disguise him as I describe him: He was a die-hard Calvinist, reared in a neo-fundamentalist home, and a darling of the school’s more stringently Reformed faculty. He was no fun. He hinted that people like me, who did not grow up in evangelical families and did not en-scripturate the Westminster Confession, teetered over heresy’s cliff. He got his PHD and joined the faculty of a neo-fundamentalist school, where he challenged some of its most cherished assumptions. Surprise-surprise, he was shown the door. He now lobs verbal grenades into the evangelical camp from his supposedly enlightened perch. My own Arminian-Wesleyan theology hasn’t substantially changed since seminary, so I’d still be suspect. Back then, I was a potential heretic. I’m now a Bible-thumping yokel.

He’s enwrapped himself in bitterness’s sweater and flares those welts. He’s even less fun than before.

I know others. They were scathing neo-fundamentalists back in the day; now, they’re the caustic enlightened ones. They’ve skipped past Calvinism’s more gracious streams (think Keller and Mouw) and didn’t bother with Pietism or Wesleyanism.

And yet, I sympathize. Again, I once wore that sweater. I lost a pastoral job at the hands of fundamentalist bullies and, I readily admit, I burned hot (one observer described my writings as “rants”). I sought spiritual sustenance beyond my evangelical tradition: I read Catholic and Eastern Orthodox literature (which I still relish) and mingled among Protestant liberals (theological liberalism, I rediscovered, still turns me off).

But something strange happened: I listened to podcasts from evangelical institutions like Asbury and Fuller theological seminaries; I heard Keller and the debaters in the Veritas Forum; I listened to the preaching at Vineyard Christian Fellowship of Evanston, Illinois, an inter-racial congregation that resettles refugees and implements the so-called charismatic gifts. All reminded me that historical evangelicalism is a broad alliance that’s neither anti-science nor politically right wing. Several of my favorite outlets are Reformed, which forces a smile: God is compelling me to learn from those with whom I disagree.

So yes: I am, indeed, an evangelical – as that term has been historically understood. Like Keller, I normally don’t use the “e” word in everyday banter because it’s lost its meaning. I usually call myself a “Classic Christian,” which ties me to creedal Christianity but frees me from long explanations beginning with, “No, I didn’t support Roy Moore …”

I’m still angry over the hijacking of the evangelical name and I know there’s a place for legitimate severity: Jesus, after all, chased out the money-changers. But he didn’t do that every day and he found room for grace.

I’m glad I no longer wear bitterness’s sweater. A welt-riddled life is no fun. And I see the wisdom in Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagrahi resistance philosophy: “The satyagrahi’s object is to convert, not to coerce the wrongdoer.”

We’ll convert no one if all our words always burn like acid.

]]>https://charlesredfern.com/2018/02/02/a-caution-to-the-enraged/feed/4chuckredfernfistThe life Of Fear v. The Life Of Adventurehttps://charlesredfern.com/2018/01/06/the-life-of-fear-v-the-life-of-adventure/
https://charlesredfern.com/2018/01/06/the-life-of-fear-v-the-life-of-adventure/#respondSat, 06 Jan 2018 20:04:18 +0000http://charlesredfern.com/?p=6228

“The Journey of the Magi” (1894) by James Jacques Joseph Tissot (French painter and illustrator, 1836-1902), oil on canvas,

From a Meditation first given at Quaker Hill Baptist Church in Connecticut on January 11, 2015:

Christians are celebrating yet another cholesterol-laden holiday: The Feast of Epiphany, which commemorates the arrival of the Magi – traditionally called The Wise Men – at the home of Jesus. Eastern Christians also remember the Baptism of Jesus.

Their story, found in Matthew 2:1-12, clues us into a characteristic about God and illuminates the contrast between two kinds of lives. There’s the life of curiosity, which leads to adventure, discovery, and growth; and the life of fear, which sees nothing but threats and leads to crisis after crisis.

The question for us, of course, is this: Which life do we want?

We can begin to ask that question even as we think of God’s characteristic in this story: God invites the un-invitable. The first-century Israelite would have anathematized the magi for at least three reasons: They were not Jews; they performed practices the ancient Israelites would have (rightly) found repulsive; and they came from the East, a region dredging fear in the national mind.

And yet, God invited them to the doorstep of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus.

Once again, we find God inviting the outsider, the stranger and the sojourner. He invites the un-invitable. That bolsters me whenever I feel deplorable and repulsive. This story tells me that God views me and all others through the eyes of grace. He’s reaching into our world an inviting us into his world. And it challenges us: Do we dismiss others as repulsive outsiders? God views them through the eyes of grace as well. He reaches into their world and invites them into His world.

The waters get really muddied when we grasp that God is not condoning the magi beliefs or activities. Those beliefs and activities remain repulsive, but the magi themselves are not. Even more confusion comes when we find that they have something to teach us. The magi in the era of Jesus viewed their surroundings with curiosity, which brought them into the life of adventure, discovery, and growth. They did not live in fear, which sees nothing but threats and leads to crisis after crisis. Such was the lifestyle of Herod and his minions.

We’ll wade our way through these muddied waters as we examine three of the story’s characters.

The main character is a two-year-old toddler, born in a town about six miles from Jerusalem. Jesus is the ultimate adventurer. He could have remained in Heaven as the pre-incarnate God and viewed the world from afar. He could have seen the war, poverty, racism, child sacrifice, sexism. sexual immorality, and power-mongering, and said: “Heaven is my home and there’s no place like home. I’m staying home.”

But he chose the adventure – an adventure leading to more adventure. Jesus chose a downward adventure so we could climb into an upward adventure. He chose the adventure into a sinful world so we could be citizens of the kingdom of heaven. He mingled with all us repulsive outsiders and invited us to his world.

Herod, otherwise known as Herod the Great, is the story’s second character. He was forged, cast, shaped, fashioned, and molded in crisis. He was born in a world of crisis; he lived in a world of crisis; he saw only crisis. Everyone was a potential enemy. Thus, he lived a life of fear that inevitably brought on calamity. We can even sympathize. He was half Idumean, meaning that half his ancestry lay with the neighboring kingdom of Edom. Jews viewed him as a repulsive outsider, so he walked in a world of plastic smiles. Those who fawned over him also hated him.

Rome authorized him to reign over Israel in about 37 BC, but he could not govern from Jerusalem for the first three years of his reign. A people known as the Parthians had invaded from the East and taken over the land, which means his reign was birthed in crisis and nurtured in fear. He did everything he could to protect his position. He murdered his wife; he murdered two of her sons; he murdered her mother; and he murdered his own eldest son. Caesar Augustus, the Roman ruler at the time of these events, said that it would be safer to be Herod’s pig than his son.

We’ll group the magi into one and call them the story’s third character. They came from the east, from the region of Israel’s historic invaders. Paintings invariably portray three old men bearing treasure chests, but the Gospel only describes three gifts. We don’t know how many men there were, nor do we know their age.

The term, magi, had been once used of a cast of priests in the region now known as Iraq. They were a loosely knit group by the time of Jesus, fascinated by dreams, astrology, magic, and books with mysterious references to the future. They were thought of as wise, so “wise man” is not an inaccurate designation. Verse two shows us their interest in astrology because they sought the night sky for answers: “Where is the one who has been born the king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him.”

Which is why these un-invitable magi were so un-invitable. The biblical writers frowned on the astrology of that era. It saw the Earth as the universe’s center. Plants were living powers. The sun, moon, and stars were objects of worship. Such beliefs were abhorrent to the first-century Israelite and meet disagreement from Christians today.

That’s why verse two reaches out and grabs us. God placed a star in the sky, knowing full-well that the un-invitable magi would be looking up. He dangled it there, inviting the un-invitable out of their world and into his world. God communicated to them in terms they’d understand, knowing the importance of doctrine and knowing that their doctrine was far from His. But he also knew that they were open to the possibilities. They were open to the signs of God and the voice of God and the ways of God. They were curious. They were adventurous. They were not bound by fear.

God invited these un-invitables into His adventure and they accepted his invitation. They launched a caravan that would take them out of the land of false gods and into the land of the true god (like it or not, the Bible does distinguish between true and false and good and evil and right and wrong). God was not compromising with false beliefs. He was reaching into their world but he was not leaving them there.

Such are the rewards of the life of curiosity.

Herod shows us the consequences of a life of fear. Verse three says he was greatly troubled. I understand that. It also says all Jerusalem was greatly troubled. I understand that as well. These mysterious wise men were from the East, the land of the dreaded Parthians and Babylonians and Assyrians, empires that once swallowed Israel and exiled its inhabitants. They were talking about a new king, which could have sparked fear of rival monarchs and impeding crisis. But such fear blinded him to the potential adventure: the magi spoke of the Israelite Messiah, not an Eastern despot. They were the first Gentiles whom the Messiah reached. He was, after all, meant to be a light to the Gentiles (Isaiah 49:6).

This fear, understandable as it is, propelled Herod into acts of self-protection that brought tragedy. He assembled the priests and teachers and discovered the Messiah’s birthplace, Bethlehem. He met with the magi themselves, thinking he could use them to get at that child. In short, he prepared himself for the crisis of a usurper. He missed the adventure of the Messiah and the implicit message of the magi: Non-Israelites – including Idumeans – were now welcome.

The magi did pay homage to Jesus. They heard from God again and did not report back to Herod. The king, blinded by fear, tried to solve a problem that was not a problem: He had the babies of Bethlehem killed. His fear of crisis brought an act of desperation – an act for which he would be known through the millennia.

Such are the consequences of a life dominated by fear.

So the question lingers: Can we abandon our fears and go for the adventure?

Fear isolates us at our battle stations as we ready ourselves for conflict and antagonists. We forge alliances but shield ourselves from genuine friendships. The adventuresome risk love. They long to discover what lies beyond the hills; the fearful worry about enemies in the next valley. The adventuresome prepare for difficulty; the fearful run away from calamity and foster crisis in their attempts to flee it. Both the adventuresome and the fear-full see the same thing, but they pose different questions and perform different actions and get different results.

Let’s step off the platform of fear. Let’s climb onto the platform of curiosity. Look and see Jesus as he ventures downward, into a world of un-invitables. He meets us where we are and guides us into an upward adventure. He’ll escort us out of our confined and limited world and bring us into his vast and expansive universe.

]]>https://charlesredfern.com/2018/01/06/the-life-of-fear-v-the-life-of-adventure/feed/0chuckredfernJourney of the magi